“You want my best guess, it’s that he’ll wake up some time tomorrow—today, rather—with a thumping headache, and no recollection of what he’s doing here, but no lasting disability. And if I’m wrong …”
“Yes?”
He shrugged. “It won’t be the first time.”
Deacon’s lips tightened. “If you’re right, how long will he be in here?”
“Weeks, anyway. He’s going to be pretty immobile to start with.”
“When can I talk to him?”
“Not today. Maybe tomorrow. If I’m happy about it.”
Deacon frowned. “You do know the situation? He’s a suspect in a murder inquiry, and this crash may not have been an accident. I’d be grateful if you’d prevent him from committing suicide, at least until he’s signed a confession.”
The doctor turned to him and smiled. “Superintendent, he won’t be able to sign anything until he has the use of his arms again. But as luck would have it, he also won’t be able to cut his throat. Don’t worry, he’s safe with us.”
Deacon returned home, evicted Dempsey from the warm spot in the bed and went back to sleep. The alarm went at eight, and before he dressed he phoned the hospital. Nicky Speers was still stable, still unconscious.
Insofar as he reckoned on taking a day off, Sunday was it. But not when he was up to his ears in a case. He phoned again from the office at nine, from his car at eleven, and from the little French restaurant where he and Brodie were having lunch at one. This time the news was better. Nicky had woken up, taken a sip of orange juice and gone back to sleep.
“How much does he remember?”
“He remembered which hole the orange juice goes in,” said the doctor coldly
“I’m on my way,” said Deacon.
“He’s a sick boy. I’m not waking him up for you to bully him.”
“I’m not going to bully him! I just need to know what happened.”
When he’d put the phone back in his pocket Brodie said mildly, “Wash your mouth out/’
He didn’t understand. “What?”
“Jack, you bully everybody. As a matter of course. I don’t think you even know you’re doing it any more.”
“I do not!” exclaimed Deacon, apparently quite shocked. “I don’t bully you.”
“No, you don’t,” she admitted. “Only because you can’t getaway with it.”
“Who, then? Who do I bully?”
“Jack—everybody! That doctor, you were trying to bully him. You bully Charlie Voss. You can’t see Daniel across a crowded room without trying to bully him. Now you want to bully a nineteen-year-old boy who’s just woken up plastered rigid in a hospital bed. That’s cup-winners’ cup bullying, that is.”
Deacon was genuinely taken aback. “I don’t know where you’ve got this idea from. Asking questions is my job. That’s not the same as bullying.”
“When it’s you it’s exactly the same,” she said firmly. “Are you really going to interrogate a boy who’s still hovering on the edge of consciousness?”
“I have to,” he said. “I have to know why he drove into that wall. He’s more likely to tell the truth now, while he’s still shaken, than when he’s had time to think about it.”
“All right,” she said, collecting her bag and signalling for the bill, “I'll come with you.”
He stared at her in astonishment. “You’ll… ?”
“Certainly. You tell me you can question a groggy, badly injured teenager in his hospital bed without bullying him. Well, let’s see you do it.”
It was a measure of his surprise that he couldn’t think of a single reason why not.
Almost their first experience of one another had been in circumstances identical to this: in a hospital room, sniping at one another over the battered body of a young man. Then it was Daniel, now it was Nicky Speers. The memory was uncomfortable for both of them.
Brodie concentrated on the boy to avoid meeting Deacon’s eyes. The doctor hadn’t exaggerated: he really was immobile, the perfect demonstration model for serious First-Aiders. And he was sleeping again. His face was bruised and swollen, his eyelids the colour of storm-clouds, and his broken lips moved in a muttered commentary of which only the odd word was clear.
Brodie turned towards the door. “We’ve no business here. Not yet.”
Her voice seemed to reach the boy. His eyes flickered open, bloodshot. A ghost of a smile bent his scabbed lips. “Hello.” He hadn’t seen Deacon.
Brodie sighed and turned back, stitching an answering smile in place. “Hi. How are you feeling?”
“Pretty crappy.” Which was unsurprising. It was reassuring in that it was the appropriate answer for the circumstances. There might yet be gaps in his memory but his mind was functioning.
Brodie looked at Deacon, assuming he’d want to step into Nicky’s limited field of vision now and start his questioning in a positively non-bullying fashion. But she was wrong. He nodded to her to continue. More for Nicky’s sake than Deacon’s, she complied.
“You came off your bike. Last night. Do you remember?”
“Mm.” She wasn’t sure if it was a yes or a no. “What’s the damage?”
“I’m not a doctor. There’s a lot of plaster, if that’s anything to go by.”
It’s hard to deliver a withering look with two black eyes but Nicky Speers managed it. “Not me. The bike.”
“I haven’t seen it,” admitted Brodie. “But I don’t think hitting a stone wall is ever good for them.”
His head jerked and he sucked in an unsteady breath. “I hit the wall? I don’t remember.”
Out of sight. Deacon scowled.
“You were nearly home,” Brodie prompted him. “Then for no apparent reason you crossed the road and hit the wall at fifty miles an hour.”
“No reason,” he echoed. The effort of keeping his eyes open proved too much and he let them slide shut. But after a moment they flickered again. “No reason?”
“The police don’t think there was any other vehicle involved. And you had been drinking.”
“One drink,” said Nicky positively. “I had one drink. What do you mean, no other vehicle?”
Deacon shot into his vision as if rocket-propelled. “You mean there was another vehicle?”
Nicky started. It was about the only movement he was capable of. “You? Then, who … ?” He looked uncertainly at Brodie.
“My name’s Brodie Farrell. We met at the farm, remember? I just wondered how you were doing.”
“Tell me about the other vehicle,” said Deacon.
“I can’t, I never saw it. But I know there was one.”
“What do you mean, you never saw it?”
“It was dark, all I saw were headlights. I came round the bend and it was on my side of the road. I swerved but he hit me.
Deacon shook his head. “The only thing that hit you was the wall.”
“He was coming right at me.” Nicky’s voice began to climb with the memory of it, the terror.
Brodie laid a cool hand on the only bit of his arm she could reach. “It’s all right. You’re safe now. It’s all over.”
“Try to tell us what happened,” said Deacon. “You say he was coming right at you?”
Nicky managed a fractional, painful nod. “I mean, right at me. I swerved to the other side of the road and he kept coming. He was trying to kill me. He must have thought he had done.”
“Who?”
“J don’t know!” exclaimed the youth impatiently. “If I didn’t see the vehicle I sure as hell didn’t see the driver. But I know what he did. I know I could have avoided him if he hadn’t switched lanes to make sure. Maybe I did hit the wall, but only because he left me nowhere else to go. I’m telling you, he tried to kill me!”
I i
Chapter Seventeen
When Deacon returned to his office Brodie headed for Sparrow Hill. She knew the bush telegraph would have beaten her with the basic facts, but she had details no one else could have yet. She
was anxious to share them with Daniel, wanted to know what he made of them. If he came to the same conclusion she had.
She hadn’t taken his concerns much more seriously than Deacon had. She’d always thought that the likeliest explanation for the intruder alert at four o’clock on Friday morning was the girls bumping into one another in the dark. Latest events cast doubt on that. If someone really had tried to kill Nicky Speers, there was one obvious candidate. He probably wasn’t top of anyone’s Christmas list about now, but this wasn’t a nuisance phonecall or someone letting his tyres down, it was an attempt on his life. Only Robert Daws hated Nicky that much.
Brodie got no answer at the cottage door, but Peris saw her from the kitchen window and waved her over. “I think he’s in the school-room.”
Brodie blinked. “On a Sunday afternoon?”
“The girls have gone out. Daniel’s planning next week’s lessons. He takes this very seriously, doesn’t he?”
Brodie bridled slightly. “Of course he does. This is what he does—his job. Did you think he wouldn’t go to much trouble for a class of two?”
“I’m sorry,” said Peris, chastened, “I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I suppose I’m just so grateful to have him here that actually teaching the children seems like a bonus. Go on up. It’s the first door on the right at the top of the stairs.”
Brodie was aware she’d over-reacted. “No, I’m sorry. I tend to jump to Daniel’s defence, whether he needs it or not.
As if he was a child. As if he was my child. It’s absurd. I make a fool of myself and embarrass him.”
Peris smiled, plump cheeks dimpling. “Don’t apologise. He has the same effect on me. It’s being little that does it, I think. And the glasses, of course. You kind of want to pat his head, like he was a spaniel.”
Brodie laughed too; and then, remembering why she was here, grew suddenly sober. “Listen, what I came to tell him -1 think you should hear it too.” Puzzled, Peris followed her upstairs.
Daniel looked up at the sound of the door. With leaning over the table his glasses had slid to the end of his nose. The two women studiously avoided looking at one another.
Then Brodie saw his face. She knew what it looked like, couldn’t imagine how it had happened. Not to Daniel. “What happened to you?”
He wouldn’t dignify the matter with undue significance by refusing to answer. “When I told the girls Jack had questioned Nicky and released him, Johnny lost it.”
“And clawed you?”
“It was over in a second,” said Daniel evenly. “And now it’s been dealt with, and I’d rather you didn’t mention it again. Why are you here?”
Brodie frowned. But it was his business, if he thought a teenage pupil scratching his face merely an occupational hazard she wasn’t going to argue with him. Not just now, anyway. She said, “I’ve just come from the hospital. Have you heard about Nicky Speers?”
“What about him?”
So she repeated all she knew. About the crash, and how Nicky said it happened. She watched Daniel’s eyes, waiting for the synapses behind them to fire.
Peris wasn’t doing calculations. She was thinking about the boy in the hospital. None of them would have been here but for him. Still… “How is he?”
“He’s pretty beat up, but he’ll be all right. Eventually.”
“Good.” The woman gave a wry little shrug. “I know he hasn’t behaved very well, but he’s only nineteen. He couldn’t have known what he was getting into, what it would lead to.” She looked away “And there’s enough people wishing him ill without me joining in.”
“The girls?”
“When we heard yesterday that Mr Deacon had let him go … well, I was glad neither of them has access to a shot-gun.”
“It’s understandable, of course,” said Daniel. “If Nicky’s young enough to get a fool’s pardon, so are the girls. Of course they blame him. The only alternative would be to lay the responsibility where most of it properly belongs, and that’s asking too much of them.”
“Their father.”
His gaze flickered. “Actually I was thinking of their mother. But yes, Robert too.”
He still hadn’t made the connection. Brodie spelled it out, carefully “Nicky says someone put him into that wall. Deliberately. It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t suicide, it was attempted murder. I could only think of one likely suspect.”
Daniel’s eyes flew wide, appalled behind the thick lenses. Then the shock turned to alarm and he hurried to the window. “Where are the girls? In the house?”
“They went out on their bikes,” said Peris, who hadn’t yet caught up. “Why, what’s—?” Then she had it. Her eyes saucered white in her face. “Robert? You think Robert ran Nicky off the road?”
“We really don’t know,” Brodie told her. “But if it really wasn’t an accident, it’s a possibility. I thought you ought to know right away. So you can keep an eye on the girls—for your own peace of mind as much as their safety.”
Daniel’s peace of mind had flown out of the window soon after Brodie came in by the door. He knew that in all likelihood everything was fine: the girls were cycling in Poole Lane as they often did and would be back for tea. But he couldn’t just wait and see. In the cauldron of his mind Robert Daws was out there somewhere, tying up loose ends. He might stop with Nicky. He might not.
‘Tm going to look for them,” he mumbled. “Brodie, can we take your car? Well cover the ground quicker that way”
“You two go one way,” said Peris, “I’ll go the other. Meet back here in fifteen minutes: if we haven’t found them by then they’ll probably have made their own way home.”
In the event it didn’t take fifteen minutes. The girls came in at the gate before the search party reached the cars. They stopped in surprise at the gathered adults, grit spitting from the bicycle wheels. “What’s the matter?”
Brodie recovered first. “Nothing. Daniel and Peris were just seeing me to my car.”
“Where did you get to?” asked Daniel.
“Up the lane a bit.” Johnny had changed into jeans and a thick sweater since he saw her last, with a baseball cap over her chestnut hair. Playing-out clothes, with green patches on the knees and elbows.
Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “Which way?”
Johnny pointed left, Em pointed right. Johnny rolled her eyes and gave a gusty sigh. “All right! We wanted to see where it happened.”
“Where what happened?” asked Daniel, deadpan.
“Where that dirty farmboy smashed his head against the wall!” declared Em triumphantly. “We heard Mr Poole talking about it. We wanted to see if there was any blood.”
“Emerald!” exclaimed Peris in dismay.
“If you want us to,” said Johnny loftily, “we could apologise. But it wouldn’t alter anything. That’s where we’ve been, and that’s why we went.”
“And was there?” asked Daniel quietly. “Any blood?”
“Couldn’t see any,” said Johnny. She swung her back-pack off her shoulder and hugged it thoughtfully. “There was a lot of oil. And bits of metal and stone. He must have hit pretty damned hard.”
He ignored her language. “He did. He’s badly hurt, he’s going to be in hospital for a while.”
“Good,” said Johnny unfeelingly. She pushed her bike down the drive with Em, in pink dungarees, tucking into line behind her.
“Look on the bright side,” said Brodie. “They’re safe.”
“That’s the bright side?” said Peris.
In the middle of the night Brodie found herself wide awake and listening. She thought at first something had disturbed her, and got out of bed and padded across the hall to Paddy’s room. The little girl was fast asleep, thumb in her mouth, wrapped around a somewhat threadbare green dragon. Dragons had been her first love, even before tractors. This one was called Howard.
Brodie tucked the quilt closer around both of them, not because it had slipped but because you can’t love someone that much without wanti
ng to make them warmer, happier, more comfortable. The child mooed, and Brodie dropped a featherweight kiss on top of her head and left her to sleep.
Still thinking she’d heard something she checked the rest of the flat, but everything was fine so she returned to bed. But she didn’t sleep, and soon she realised what it was that had woken her. Not an external event but the chinking of mental gears, the fizz of synapses, signs that her brain was up to something that it wasn’t letting her in on just yet.
It might be ignoring her but she couldn’t ignore it. She sat up with the quilt draped round her, hugging a pillow in unconscious imitation of her child, and tried to puzzle it out. This consisted of re-running everything she’d said, heard or thought about in the last twenty-four hours until she heard a beep. Then she surveyed another line until she heard the beep. At some point the beeps would reach a kind of critical mass and a nuclear reaction would begin, blasting the answer to the front of her consciousness.
But though she sat there for an hour, thinking about what Deacon had said and what Daniel had said and what Nicky Speers in his hospital bed had said, fission never occurred. The sparks fizzled out, leaving her cold and tired. She lay down. No sooner was she asleep again than the alarm went off.
She woke Paddy, said good morning to Howard—if she forgot he would certainly be presented for a proper greeting when she was putting her make-up on—and dragged herself to the bathroom.
A hot shower pummelled some life back into her but didn’t improve her mood. She glared at herself in the mirror and, not for the first time, considered the advantages of an Eton crop over dragging a brush through a frizz of dense black curls every morning. She hadn’t succumbed to the temptation yet. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t one day.
She found herself peering critically into the steamy depths of the mirror. Not a pleasant sight, she thought—Jack Deacon would have disagreed—but she always looked like this first thing in the morning. The next ten minutes would do much to mend the damage. So what was she looking for? She frowned and tried moving her head around. Nothing had fallen off in the night, nothing undesirable had grown. Whatever was she doing, staring at her reflection in a mirror?
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